Books I Wish I Wrote: On Writerly Jealousy

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1.
I am a jealous person — jealous of the vacations I see on Instagram, of my sister’s perfect hair, of the latte the man next to me just ordered — but it took me a long time to realize I was a jealous reader and writer. In fact, I didn’t know that literature was something I could be envious of until I read Marina Keegan’sThe Opposite of Loneliness. There, in the last essay of the collection, a piece titled “Song for the Special,” Keegan addresses her “unthinkable jealousies.” “Why didn’t I think to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway? I should have thought to chronicle a schizophrenic ballerina,” she writes. “It’s inexcusable.”

Like Keegan, I was angry that Michael Cunningham thought to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway first — The Hours should have been mine! Come to think of it, “Song for the Special” should have been mine! And it spread from there.

I’m jealous of ridiculous things: of Little Women, and of the original Mrs. Dalloway, if it comes down to it, and of Alice in Wonderland and of Walden. I’m jealous of Atonement and of Housekeeping. I’m jealous of every writer who’s written a feature for The Atlantic and of every Paris memoir that’s ever been published, especially the ones that involve a lot of food. I am full of unthinkable jealousies.

When I described this to a friend he corrected me. “You’re not jealous,” he said. “You’re envious. You want to have written these books, sure, but it’s not like you feel you rightfully should have.”

He’s wrong, though. I do.

My strongest jealousies have a certain logic to them. The books I’m most jealous of aren’t necessarily the ones I most admire. I love The Brothers Karamazov and I love the Oresteia, but I can’t say either inspires jealousy or envy or anything else, really, aside from a kind of awe. They exist outside me, and I can’t conceive of any alternate reality in which I might have written them. But Meghan Daum’sLife Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House? I’m jealous of that, just as I’m jealous of her first collection, My Misspent Youth. Truthfully, I’m jealous of most literary essayists, especially those who write about their homes or homely yearnings. Why? The through line is just me, that I want to have written their work. And sometimes, late at night, I allow myself to think that maybe I could have, if only they hadn’t gotten there first.

As an earnest undergraduate, I used to write obsessively about houses and their connection to identity; my scraped-together thesis covered A Room of One’s Own and Fun Home, two more books I envy. Life Would Be Perfect tackles the same questions I struggled to answer with more grace, insight, and humor then I could have ever hoped to muster at 22, if ever. When I found Daum’s memoir, too late to use it for my paper, I was unimaginably jealous. I could have written that book, or at least one very like it! All I needed was more time (and maybe an MFA)! But Daum had beaten me to it, and my handful of essays looked punier than ever. The problem wasn’t really that someone had written about refinished floors with the same zeal I felt, of course. My jealousy was largely just a cover for my terror. How could I ever write something original when someone had already explored, written, and published all of my ideas and interests?

The grand irony is that Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House is very much a book about envy. It’s a memoir about obsession, insecurity, and identity creation, but the source of all this trouble is “a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan,” not a memoir published by a talented stranger. Daum’s admission that she “sometimes found it difficult to read the Sunday paper without writhing in envy” at the luxury real estate listings and that simply “walking by certain edifices…without feeling the ache of rejection” became impossible works pretty well as a description of literary jealousy. Just replace “luxury real estate listings” with “bestseller list” and “edifices” with “the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble.”

Life Would Be Perfect charts a struggle with identity and jealousy, but here the relationship between the two isn’t necessarily destructive. Daum’s real estate envy drives her to move from Manhattan to Nebraska to L.A., creating a livable and even enjoyable life as she goes. Her jealousy ultimately incites action, not paralysis. She is not erased. The envied apartment and life are still attainable, and Daum goes after them. This time there’s a way out of the seemingly infinite jealousy loop, and she takes it.

Not all jealousy is so easily converted into action, however. Like any explosive material, it has its dangers as well as its uses, as art and history tell us again and again. Why did Cain kill Abel? Why did Medea murder not only Jason’s new bride but her own children? And why does Antonino Salieri, a passionate but mediocre Austrian court composer and the focus of Miloš Forman’s stylish film Amadeus, break down once he recognizes the overwhelming talent of a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

“From now on we are enemies, You and I,” Salieri spits, not at Mozart but at a crucifix, in a scene at the heart of the film. He isn’t angry at the prodigy; here it’s God who’s the enemy. “You chose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy, and gave me for award only the ability to recognize the incarnation,” Salieri complains. “Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it.” And he does, eventually killing Mozart with sheer overwork and nervous exhaustion. God gave Salieri “only the ability to recognize the incarnation” of ability, the desire for brilliance but none of the brilliance itself. What could be worse? What could be more relatable for a reader and aspiring writer?

2.In “An Ode to Envy,” a TED Talk, senior editor at the New York Review of Books and remarkable essayist Parul Sehgal points out that without jealousy there wouldn’t be much literature to speak of. No William Shakespeare, no Anna Karenina, no Brothers Karamazov, no Madame Bovary, no Marcel Proust. One of the wonders of fiction, she argues, is its ability to accurately capture and reflect our jealousy. The power and dark appeal of envy, so often blurred in real life, are fully revealed in our greatest novels. Sehgal adds that jealousy itself is creative work. “When we feel jealous we tell ourselves a story,” she explains. “We tell ourselves a story about other people’s lives, and these stories make us feel terrible because they’re designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience we know just what details to include…Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists.”

But what about those of us who deal in nonfiction? What does essayistic jealousy look like? Is it possible that our jealousy is simultaneously less creative and more painful then its fictional counterpart? Is it possible that it’s less jealousy and more insecurity? Less Sehgal and more Salieri?

When we say, “all of my ideas have already been had,” what we’re expressing isn’t jealousy, it’s doubt in our own creativity, in our worthiness to write about anything at all. Never mind that originality in the broadest sense is hardly possible, and never mind that the beauty of most good essayistic writing lies in the writer’s ability to both make the specific feel universal and, paradoxically, turn the commonplace into something momentarily extraordinary. When we say “I should have written that,” what we mean is “How unjust, unfair, unkind that you were faster, smarter, and more fortunate than I. How terrible that I have nothing more to offer.” We’re not amateur novelists at all, just whiners.

Sehgal has a suggestion, drawn from “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” a Sherlock Holmes story in which the bumbling detective Lestrade finally allows himself to admire Holmes’s incredible abilities rather than resenting his genius. “What if jealousy really is just a matter of geometry, just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand?” Sehgal wonders. “What if we don’t have to resent somebody’s excellence, [but instead] we can align ourselves with it?”

Easier said then done, sure, but as an idealistic goal it’s better than nothing, and certainly far better than Salieri’s murderous vision. It works particularly well when one is wrestling with awe in the face of true talent and real brilliance. It works considerably less well if one is frustrated by more possible comparisons, by mere issues of timing and semi-plausible “if onlys.”

For this second, more practical problem of jealousy, Meghan Daum again offers a solution. In the foreword to the 2015 edition of My Misspent Youth, the essay collection that made her career, Daum tells a story about the title essay. Immediately after finishing a first draft “in a two-week fury,” Daum came across a strikingly similar essay by Vince Passaro in Harper’s. “Reading his story,” she writes, “I felt even more certain I was on to something…I was also certain that no one would ever publish my essay now because it had effectively already been published.”

It is at this point that many writers’ basest instincts would kick in, but Daum gets to work. There’s no sense of frustration or injustice, no hint of insecurity. She isn’t jealous; she is a writer. So, she “rewrote [the essay] several times,” changing the focus to something more unique to her experience, separating it from the more general essay that preceded it. An easy solution? No, but a simple one.

Daum’s approach is infinitely more practical than my own patented sulking, but I don’t think it will ever totally replace it. Four million Google results on writerly jealousy say this is a plague without cure, though it does have the benefit of giving us all something to commiserate about. So long as we’re human and flawed, we’ll be jealous. So long as there are writers in every coffee shop and on the staff of every magazine and behind the cover of every one of the thousands of fresh books printed each year, there will be people for us to envy. Just, please, nobody else write about their homes for a while, okay? I think it’s my turn.

1.
Peter Parker was born in 1945 and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, under the care of his uncle and aunt. Ben Parker was a gentle man. May was a doting but naïve caregiver. Peter was a prodigy and Ben and May Parker encouraged his scientific aspirations. It was a happy home, but at school Peter was the target of low-key verbal bullying and though an outside observer would have considered the taunts mild, they amounted to a form of abuse that haunted him well into his adulthood.
In the early 1960s, several young men and women in the New York City area gained superhuman powers thanks to a series of nuclear experiments held in violation of rudimentary safety codes. That was Peter’s story. He was at a certain place at a certain time and a radioactive spider bit his hand. Within 24 hours, his body underwent a metamorphosis. He was now faster, stronger, and more agile than most members of the human race and possessed a sixth sense which warned him of danger. He sewed a red-and-blue suit which showed off his new thin-muscled body, a body he was proud of and for which he had done nothing to deserve.
He entered and won a wrestling contest. He was a great success, but he was too young to appreciate his good luck. In a moment of self-absorption, he failed to stop a thief. By coincidence that criminal would later kill Ben Parker, and upon discovering the consequences of his selfishness, the teenager decided he would use his powers to help others. He invented webbing fluid, a potent but non-lethal weapon which allowed him to swing across the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan and trap opponents in viscous nets. He became Spider-Man, an amazing addition to the New York skyline. A hyphen separated the two parts of his name.
2.Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Peter Parker first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in December 1962. In his debut, he was friendless, miserable, and smarter than everyone in every room he ever walked into. Ditko, a former horror comics artist, had learned to draw humans at their most vulnerable and grotesque and his Peter Parker was an attenuated figure, handsome but not too good-looking, a little damaged. In the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man Parker proved to be a very good superhero, but he wasn’t slick and that was part of his charm. “Isn’t there just a little of Peter Parker in all of us?” That’s the final line of The Amazing Spider-Man #27, from August 1965. In that issue, he loses his uniform and had to make do with a cheap version he picked up in a costume shop. Spider-Man lost his mask in fights. He also lost fights. He fought common colds while in the middle of fights. The superhero who could be you.
Peter Parker was Spider-Man for many reasons and not all of them could be named. He suffered an oppressive guilt for the death of his Uncle Ben, but guilt wasn’t enough for him to do what he did; Parker doesn’t even mention his uncle for three years following the origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15. The truth is that Peter Parker enjoyed being more powerful, better than his peers who made fun of him and better than the criminals he fought. His social circle knew nothing about his abilities, and he took an arrogant pride in his secret identity. He was a sadist, within limits. He never killed anyone, but he enjoyed humiliating and hurting his opponents, taunting them with one-liners -- he was a Woody Allen fan but he lacked Woody Allen’s talent -- and he rarely softened a punch even when fighting those he could crush with two fingers. He started fights with Johnny Storm, the good-looking member of the Fantastic Four and the subject of Parker’s envy and admiration. He was a narcissist.
He was also Spider-Man because he needed money. He sold photographs of his fights with criminal misfits and ugly men to J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher of Now! and The Daily Bugle, who wrote editorials prejudicing the general public against the young superhero. Peter’s freelancing helped his Aunt May survive her widowhood and earned him spending cash. But in the end, he was profiting off of violence, on fights that he sometimes started. He was also a dishonest journalist. After he failed to photograph a battle with Sandman, he restaged it using large piles of sand.
Yet he was, at heart, a good man and he suffered for his goodness. In Amazing Spider-Man #1 he flirts with the idea of crime in order to help his Aunt May save their house, but he eventually takes pride in his basic decency. He privately acknowledged the good in even his worst bully, Flash Thompson. He was devoted to his aunt. He continued his work as a vigilante even while facing a public that hated him. He honored that role no matter how much it disrupted his personal life.
He grew older, his posture improved, and he found himself in a series of relationships with beautiful women who noticed his charm and his blue eyes. But he was an incompetent and absent lover, more loyal to his secret identity than he was to his women, though he did save their lives on numerous occasions. In the context of the time, he was strangely under-eager to take advantage of the sexual revolution. His life as a superhero could be exhilarating, but it brought him only so much joy. He was a loner. He was also a lonely man.
Thanks to the open-ended, half-planned nature of comic-book serial storytelling, Lee and Ditko could discover new facets of Peter Parker’s psychology in small ways from one month to the next, allowing the man to contradict and amend himself to the point where his heroism was as strange as the anti-heroism of Walter White, his pop-cultural antithesis. John Romita took over for Ditko in Amazing Spider-Man #39 in August 1966 and completed Parker’s transformation into a romance-comics heartthrob, discovering the depression inherent in the young man’s doleful charm. So no, it’s not so much that Spider-Man was the superhero who could be you, though Lee used that very phrase in the comics. Spider-Man was one of the few superheroes who was more interesting than the supervillains he fought.
3.
Spider-Man and Peter Parker were inventions of New York, not the New York of our world, but a New York, despite all Lee and Ditko’s use of proper landmark names, that was as foreign as Metropolis or Gotham City. When Marvel Comics introduced a new Spider-Man in its Ultimate Universe a few years ago, one who had a black father and a Latino mother, the decision only highlighted one of the weirder elements of the world Lee and Ditko created 50 years before. Parker was a working-class teenager growing up in 1960s Queens and yet his social circle -- Mary Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds -- did not include anyone with an obvious white-ethnic marker, an Irish, Italian, or Jewish name. The interior of Parker’s high school was based on the one Ditko attended in Johnstown, Penn. When Parker graduated high school he entered Empire State University, an amalgam of Columbia and City College, which again, oddly, had strikingly few non-white-ethnics. He mostly fought petty hoods who spoke like '40s B-movie gangsters. Parker’s world was lily-white until issue #51 (August 1967), when Robbie Robertson, a black man, takes a city editor position at The Daily Bugle, and drug-free until issues #96 through #98 (May-July 1971), when Harry Osborn faces the consequences of his acid trips. And as much as he fancied himself an outsider, he was very much at home in his version of the city.
This New York provided a template against which Peter Parker, with all his self-doubts and all his angst, could invent himself. The superhero genre had existed for at least three decades before he showed up, and part of Parker wondered if he was a kind of Don Quixote, dressing up and playing out a fantasy for a world that did not need his heroism. But this particular New York did need him. The presence of supervillains, of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, always prepared to kill thousands, suggested that this shadow New York was under constant threat of annihilation. In our world, Peter Parker would be a true madman. (Actually in our world, the U.S. government would have captured and held him in a terrible facility and re-engineered him into a super soldier. It also would have figured out a way to turn his webbing fluid into either a torture or lethal weapon on a massive scale. Imagine a giant thick substance designed to cover entire cities and suffocate all of its inhabitants.) But Parker challenged his homogenous version of New York and made it more interesting. In his New York, he could be a most beautiful man, like Don Quixote or Jean Valjean or Samuel Pickwick -- Dostoevsky’s three famous examples of the archetype -- a figure whose greatest creation, born out of neurosis and genius, is himself.
This is why he is loved. This is why you want to be him. And this is why he is not the superhero who could be you.
4.
The problem with Spider-Man is the same problem with all popular comics heroes. Eventually, after several hundred issues, he hit a moment of stasis in which he stopped evolving, stopped discovering the strange hidden facets of his personality.
Still, writers and artists attempted and sometimes succeeded in putting their signatures on Parker. In July 1973, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, and Romita killed off Gwen Stacy in the middle of a fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. There is a consensus among fans that she died from whiplash from the web Parker shoots to save her, thus providing a space for a new form of a guilt for Parker to explore. I was 10 when I got into reading my older brother’s collection from the late '80s. That Spider-Man was still interesting. He was a college dropout, fighting to make rent, seriously wondering how he wasted his intellectual talents in the interest of crime fighting. But within a few years, after he married Mary Jane Watson, he ceased to be credible. In the early '90s, Todd McFarlane’s artwork exaggerated Spider-Man’s contortionism, while his writing accentuated his sadism and diminished his wit, transforming one of the great geek heroes into a dumb jock. By the 2000s, the storylines within the regular Marvel continuity had achieved a level of absurdity that demanded retconning. In one limited series set in the future, Parker’s radioactive semen kills Mary Jane. Marvel writers in their attempts to be gritty, had become the equivalent of literary novelists who reach for Holocaust references as substitutes for gravitas. Their fascination with ultra-violence obscured the essence of Spider-Man.
Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’sUltimate Spider-Man, which launched in September 2000, started everything over again, and attempted to return the hero to his roots. In Bendis and Bagley’s version, Parker was a millennial and his Uncle Ben and Aunt May were aging hippies. And Parker looked to John Hughes movies for inspirations for his one-liners. “It’s almost Shakespearean in the sense that the theme of it, the morality of it, all of it holds true,” Bendis told me in an interview that appeared in Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimatum. “And you can change the setting, you could put it all on a space station and the story of Peter Parker getting bit by a spider would resonate all these ideas. So once I came to terms with that, that I’m adapting a work by Shakespeare, it became very freeing.”
Bendis and Bagley did capture Peter Parker’s morality. Their stories were cleanly plotted, Bendis’s writing was slick, and Bagley’s pen, and later that of Stuart Immonen who replaced him in the 111th issue (September 2007), looked more to Romita’s romance than Ditko’s horror ethos for inspiration. And yet that slickness and Peter’s unquestionable decency formed the title’s main flaw. Bendis’s Parker was a little too charismatic. The characters in the Ultimate Universe loved him more than any of the comic’s readers could. I liked the comic myself, but a true Spidey agoniste would have preferred the Peter Parker of the Ditko and Romita years.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy was a throwback to the Ditko and Romita years. All three of his movies, even the much maligned Spider-Man 3, have fine moments, though they spend far more time studying Peter Parker’s guilt than the other more disturbing aspects of his personality. Raimi’s horror-movie pathos turned Spider-Man’s villains into tragic figures. Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, in his final moments, rediscovers a moral clarity and sacrifices himself in order to undo his evil plans. Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman attempts to grasp his dead wife’s wedding ring even as his fingers dissipate into tiny molecules. Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man is sweet, naïve and gentle, and a fine presence, but he exists to counterbalance the weight of evil and age more than to exert his awesome self.
Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker in Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man movies, themselves modeled on the Bendis/Bagley and the Bendis/Immonen runs, is the most physically interesting one we’ve seen on screen. He’s discovered the line between Parker’s teenage awkwardness and Spider-Man’s athleticism, Parker’s brooding charm and Spider-Man’s power, and beneath it all there lies his constant melancholy. He’s a young-adult hero with a riot of conflicting rages that recall those suffered by Lee and Ditko’s Parker. Working with a by-the-numbers screenplay, Garfield reimagines a beautiful man, a flesh-and-blood being, that otherwise would have been nothing more than a symbol, or, considering the nature of Sony and Disney/Marvel’s competing interests, a trademark.
5.
The Peter Parker of the regular Marvel Universe has no real fears in any of his battles, which he always manages to survive. He’s barely aged 10 years in the 52 since he first appeared. Immortality has erased the stakes of his existence. He has no reason to evolve. These are the kinds of story-telling decisions, made in the interest of the profit motive, that can rob a character of his soul.
The best thing about the Peter Parker of the Ultimate Universe is his mortality. He dies at the age of 16 in Ultimate Spider-Man #160 (August 2011) saving his aunt, his friends, and his neighbors from the Green Goblin. Unless something happened in between the panels that Bendis did not mention, he dies a virgin. And he does not come back. Death makes his sweetness and his goodness tragic and beautiful. It makes Peter Parker human, and, in at least one particular way, a superhero who could be you.
I don’t imagine the Spider-Man Lee and Ditko created in 1962 dying in any major battle, but I do imagine an alternate reality for him, one that diverges from the Marvel storyline sometime in the early '70s, when Parker is still in college. He realizes at that point that he’s gone about as far as he could go as Spider-Man, which was always a fun but immature project. He learns to dislike violence and prefers helping people in more peaceful ways. He spends more time in costume at children’s hospitals, and eventually starts showing up out of costume. More superheroes have shown up in New York, and most of them, he’s now humble enough to realize, are better at crime fighting. He goes for one last night-swing, comes home to his apartment, folds up his costume and places it in a box at the back corner of his closet.
He starts dating more and notices that he has fewer inhibitions. After breaking up once with Mary Jane Watson, he starts dating a handsome man he meets in a chemistry lab. It goes on for a few months, he discovers a form of affection he didn’t realize he was capable of, but he returns happily to Mary Jane.
He graduates college. He forgoes a hard career in science after he discovers an allergy to corporate structures and a love of teaching. He teaches in one of New York’s magnet programs while at home he tinkers with his brilliant inventions, creating all sorts of wonders far more interesting than web fluid. He decides to keep his work to himself.
He marries Mary Jane and they have children. They enter into a routine by the time they hit their 40s. On Friday nights, they go up to the rooftop of their Park Slope home. Mary Jane lights up a joint. He performs some mild acrobatics. Then they go back downstairs.
The kids graduate high school. They graduate college. They get married and give him grandchildren.
And then Peter Parker, the most beautiful man New York has ever known, dies.
Image Credit: Wikipedia

I wrote all day and late into the night. There was something magical about this time. I was suspended, insulated, cared for, and writing — all in the privacy of the Virginia countryside. My teaching job and the staring eyes of my students seemed very far away. I started to feel like the wood-nymph Daphne, transformed into something that would confound my pursuers.

7 comments:

I had a teacher who used to say, Yup, Shakespeare was a better writer. Okay, a way better writer. So, what? I should quit writing? He maintained that you can still have something to add to the Great Conversation, not unlike Daum’s “aligning yourself with excellence.” Forcing oneself to ride those coattails of another’s excellence to one’s own benefit and sucking up that genius as inspiration for your own work. I think you and Daum are onto something. The alternative is just a stinkin’ gloomy existence. The Salieri example is particularly cautionary.

But — i loved this! so refreshing to just admit to jealousy/envy (not sure what the diff is) without shame and self-loathing. And actually using one of the 7 deadlies for good and not evil. Well done!

And to add to the comments, I’m not going to let ULYSSES’s virtuosity get in the way of telling my stories. Nobody living today will ever write as well as Joyce and Shakespeare. So what? It doesn’t mean you should capitulate your high standards, but it’s always good to have a high mark to shoot for.

What Jack M said. Your voice is your voice. MRS. DALLOWAY doesn’t just belong to Cunningham or Woolf. In fact, the idea that Virginia Woolf is “owned” by that wildly overrated and egregiously lachrymose novelist leads me to think that someone has a better “take” on MRS. DALLOWAY, which in turn becomes its own artistic achievement if the writer is committed to Art. If you want to put your spin on it, feel free. Is Stewart O’Nan’s WEST OF SUNSET any less a Stewart O’Nan novel, even though it covers the same time period and details in Sheilah Graham’s BELOVED INFIDEL? Jealousy, which is not to be confused by the admiration of saying “I wish I’d written that book” (which I’ve said many times), is a useless and savage emotion anathema to creativity. It erects a wall It says that you don’t have the fortitude or the courage to go the distance when these are the truthful qualities we need in contemporary literature.

@Edward Champion — Yes, exactly. Admiration for great work is a positive, even if tinged with J & E . And yes, there is always room for another take on any story. The final word is never written, just the latest.

It’s good to share a cup of teardrop tea with people who understand. I read a book and loved it. And when I finished it, reader’s euphoria turned to writer envy. In fact, I got so cranky that I hadn’t gotten there first, I got busy writing. Motivation was the greatest gift that book gave me.

In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I'm pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence "provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator."In honor of Presidents Day, I thought I'd return to the "lost art" of diagramming - last practiced (by me) in the Seventh Grade classroom of Mrs. Brenda Wooten - to see what I could learn about the mind of President Barack Obama. I selected a representative, and widely quoted, sentence from last week's primetime press conference. The topic was the malfeasance of Bush Administration officials. Obama told Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein this:The basic lucidity of this response, and its analytical ambition (this is the quality Obama critics, and some fans, call "professorial"), may be clearer in the transcript. (With apologies to the HuffPo, I've turned the period between "citizen" and "but" to a comma; Obama's answer is a single, complete sentence, rather than a complete sentence plus a fragment):My view is also that nobody's above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.The diagram, though, offers several insights. First, the elegant balance of the central construction (My view is that x, and that y, but also that z) shows that Obama has a good memory for where he's been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he's going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.) The third "that" - thrown in 29 words into a 43-word sentence - creates three parallel predicate nouns. And then there's a little parallel flourish at the end: "I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back."Nothing feels tacked on; the "ums" and "ahs" Obama sometimes inserts into his speeches are not meant to buy time to think about substance, or to long for a teleprompter (sorry, conservative bloggers), but to make sure his long sentences stay on solid grammatical terrain. At the same time, Obama's confidence in the basic architecture of his sentences allows him to throw in some syntactically varied riffs and qualifiers: an absolute phrase here, a correlative conjunction or comparative adjective there.By contrast with the syntax, the diction is quite straightforward, which may account for why the majority of Americans, unlike their pundit overlords, don't seem to feel that Obama is talking down to them. The verbs here are all "to be" verbs, given weight by participles like "prosecuted" and "interested," and by the muscular commonplaces, "above the law," "looking forward" and "looking back." The only superfluous adjective is "clear," which sounds positively Bush-like, even as it serves to qualify the clause it's attached to. Even more remarkable: by virtue of the third "that," this is a complex sentence, but not a compound one. Like "I'm the decider," it has a single, copulative predicate.This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine... or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smithcalls "having more than one voice in your ear." Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama's favorite word: "but." What appears to be a hard line - "My view is... that nobody is above the law" - turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: "I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back." The most controversial part of the sentence - "people should be prosecuted" - gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle.It is possible - mistaken, I think, but certainly possible - to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer, and if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: "The beef, assuming it's in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I'd be eager to try it." But to underrate the subtlety and appeal of Obama the communicator is to be out of touch with Americans' hunger to be addressed as adults. Indeed, after "You're with us or you're against us" and "Putin rears his head," such thoughtfulness seems positively worth celebrating.

Reader responses are not reviews, and they’re not criticism. They’re raw, usually spontaneous reactions to my work. They’re valuable to me because they make me feel like I’m sitting right next to the reader, watching them bite their lip or roll their eyes as they scroll down the page.